The Awakening and Courtship of Kelly Karr Green: an AH Love Story
by George Parkins
Summary: Mz. Green and Celia fall in love! Note: This is a fanfic of an interactive webcomic. Please don't diss it if you don't frequent that comic's forum. It has plenty of references to the esoteric Bogleechian lore of Awful Hospital, as well as stuff I made up or inferred from it. There's also a few throwaway references to Greek Gnosticism and Kabbalah, in the grand tradition of NGE.
1. Chapter 1

The Awakening and Courtship of Kelly Karr Green: An Awful Hospital Love Story

By George M. Parkins

Thank Bogleech (Bogleech dot com) if you like this. He owns the characters, the setting, and he could squash me like one of his pet bugs if he wanted to. Please don't hurt me, Jonathan C. Wojcik! – George.

I

The place they'd found themselves in was a welcome change. It was decidedly inorganic at first blush, although the white stone of the walls might just have been bone. The room was rectangular, although the angles were a bit, shall we say, _strange._ Someone had lived here: there was basic furniture made of keratin and some kind of fiber. The smell was less offensive to the human than anywhere else in the—ahem—world they'd been to so far.

Kelly Green had had a migraine for some time. It was annoying, but barely beginning to worry her: she had about a million other things on her mind. Celia, on the other hand, was beginning to be uncharacteristically concerned. She had been intending to use this creature to get back at the tribe of bandits that had thrown her out, but they were quickly finding themselves quite close. As they began checking the area to make sure it was safe, Kelly suddenly made a painful sound and sat down on a primitive chair, with her head in her hands.

Celia was surprised how quickly her appendages were on Kelly's shoulders. There was a name for this feeling, the feeling that another person has become more important to you than yourself. If only the young mycelium knew the word for it off the top of her head…

"What's wrong?"

"Something's _wonky_. Like, for instance, it took you forever to say 'what's,' but not long at all to say 'wrong.' And it's weird, because I know we got here a minute ago, but...aaah!" She trailed off, moaning in pain.

"It'll be alright," Celia said, and realized with quiet resignation that that was the kind of thing she never said. Had she ever comforted another being when it was in pain? She couldn't think of any time she had, no…

It had begun: she was losing/is losing/s_hall then_ _be_ losing her normal, human perception of time. It was all breaking apart. After making sure she was comfortable, Celia very discretely read her mind. It was in a feverish turmoil—and Celia knew it all too well. Kelly was awakening. Not easy, like a grey-zoner who was ready to graduate to the blue. This was worse. This was _unkind_.

Celia stopped hiding the fact that she was in Kelly's head.

"What…ahhh!" Kelly said, as the mycelium shouldered some of the mental burden of the awakening. The headache was gone, and the human did something that struck Celia funny. She looked up at the head-equivalent part of the fungus, and actually smiled, a tender, grateful smile.

As Kelly let her guard down, Celia saw a flashback to the human woman's younger years; fragmented, buried behind neural walls twenty through twenty-nine:

_"__How __**could **__you, Kelly? I thought you were mine. You would two-time me? With...! Really?! Get away from me!"_

Another voice comes in. It's that of a woman. There's the same hurt in her voice:

_ "__**K. K.! **__I __**trusted**__ you."_

Green answers her:

_"__Wha—what's this about?"_

_ "__Still seeing him?! You were still seeing him? We were… We were…! And you cheated on me with that… (Scoff!)"_

Celia saw it all, and she knew. Celia knew bad relationships, whether between vertebrates, conceptual beings or her own fungusapiens, and Celia? She knew enough not to let her relive it. Straining her telepathic powers to the maximum, she wrapped her own mind around the bad memories.

"Celia?! What's happening?"

There came a comforting darkness as they both blacked out.

Time passes, as it flows from all things to all things, defying the attempts of any but the Monad himself to understand it in its fullness. Time flowed over them as they lay there unconscious, for several layers. And they dreamed. They dreamed together. They dreamed such a dream, a dream of holding each other, and floating through the void, safe in the protective radius of their good feelings, safe from the nightmares of the abyss. A distant, inhuman voice was singing a beautiful song, echoing across the darkness. There came a noise only rarely heard by the denizens of the abyss: the fluttering of feathered wings.

They spoke to each other in the dream, in tongues neither of them recognized, but which they seemed, for the moment at least, to understand.

"I love you."

"I…I…"

Then they awoke. It seemed like it was ages before either of them said or thought a word.

Kelly had broken through. She was awake, and her eyes were open to all the nine lower zones. What was a bit more impressive, for a former grey-zoner, was that she understood it all by instinct. She didn't need to be told, and didn't need to sort out all the new facts. Her thoughts were on something else now, though. She was looking at Celia, and Celia was regarding her. For the first time in what seemed like forever, they were both happy.

"What is it, Kelly?"

"Nothing, just…" and she let out a sigh of utter contentment, which Celia somehow reciprocated, despite her lack of lungs.

It was several minutes before they noticed something quite peculiar. Around where they laid, a circle of mycelium sporelings had grown around around them, but rather than the teal color they should have been, they were green. If Celia hadn't been in love with Kelly already, she was now. The sweet human was to be the co-genitor of her children, after all, and what a committed parent she seemed to be already!

They embraced each other. Then they saw it, staring at them from the doorway, its mouth _gaping. _The one with lungs gasped.

To be continued…


	2. Chapter 2

II

A horrible creature had snuck in to the room while they had been embracing. It was like a mess of guts with six padded feet and three chinese-dragon-esque heads, and its intentions were absolutely clear.

In a moment of blinding action, both had drawn their primitive swords and attacked the beast. Two of its mouths were open and menacing them, just a few feet from their bodies. Celia managed to break her sword off in between a pair of eyes, but it had already bitten Kelly. Celia rushed to pry the mouth in question off of the human, as the head she had wounded writhed in pain. The jaw wasn't strong, but the mouth reeked of death. As Kelly jumped back, free, Celia grapped the needle-sword from her and stuck it down the creature's throat. Thin, yellowish blood squirted out. The other two mouths roared in a broken harmony, and the beast slumped over, apparently gravely wounded. The two remaining heads moaned for some time. Celia looked over her lover's injuries.

It was bad. It would be very, very bad if it got infected. She had been bitten on her lower abdomen on one side, and some slime from its serrated teeth was visible around the five or six ragged punctures. After making sure Kelly was comfortable, Celia examined the beast carefully, trying to figure out why she had never seen anything like it before. She couldn't help Kelly as well if she didn't know what kind of toxin or infection it spread.

"Spores!"

"Wha-what?"

"It's three worms in a knot! Those legs are its bifurcated tails. I don't remember what you call these, but I used to kill them all the time when I was a kid."

"Am I going to be alright?"

"Ye-No. We need to get you to the worm village healer right away!"

"What... what is it?"

"I used to see worms die of this kind of bite all the time. It doesn't kill fungus, but..."

"Yeah. I understand. I can walk."

"For now... Oh, love..."

Celia could barely understand the words coming out of her mouth. She had already decided to brave worm village, for a creature little better than a worm herself? A cautious little entity within her mind, a kind of mental safeguard that all fungus have, uttered the only word in its vocabulary: "Whaat." That incredulous voice had saved Celia a couple of hundred times, but now she practically shushed it. What had happened to her?

They left for the worm village immediately, after Celia made sure her sporelings were safe. They threaded their way through the mazes of the underflesh far quicker than before. Once they were standing on the banks of the sickly river, Kelly began feeling weak. A few more steps and she fainted for a moment.

Kelly had previously only known the horrors of the universe from what she saw reflected in that part of her mind that she called her "imagination". In her moment of transition, she had glimpsed shapes, places, colors, but now her perception range was expanding even further. Talking bacteriophages, syringe men, whatever the hell Mann was supposed to be: the Hospital had seemed like an acid dream. Ms. Green had had a headtrip in her day, courtesy of hanging out with the wrong crowd, senior year at her Catholic high school, and the Hospital barely phazed her. But the things she was seeing now, in the corners of her mind? It terrified her more than English can describe. Shapes had become sharper, and even painful to look at. Terrible creatures leered before her, making the mess of worms they had just fought look like petting-zoo stuff. As she sank deeper into unconsciousness, she knew from instinct that something important was about to happen: she was going to meet her Reverberation Master.


	3. Chapter 3

III

Celia was terrified. Kelly had collapsed! She racked her brain, trying to remember her first-aid classes. No use: it had been too long ago, and there hadn't been much about treating worms. She didn't know what to do…

In her hallucination, Kelly was floating gently downward. It wasn't a new experience. Eventually, her feet hit ground, and she found she was standing up. She was vaguely aware that she was in a room with many bookshelves, but she couldn't focus enough to really see any of it. A bright light was shining at her, and a clicking, insect-like sound was coming from behind it.

A voice like the sound of locusts spoke to her: "A real shame, child."

"Wha-what?"

"Going out in the first round… Tut, tut…"

"Who are you? What do you mean?"

"You want to live? You have about three seconds left…" The voice said. It had a female quality to it, and the words were more than a bit snide.

"Yes! Yes!" Kelly said, before the voice could say anything else.

"I mean out there. Three seconds out there. You have time in here to make up your mind."

"I want to live, of course!"

"Calm down! Some people who come here don't want to live, y'know. I have to ask, these days."

"Who are you? Will you just answer?!" Kelly said, becoming increasingly agitated.

"I am the Ruler of All Memory and all Information!"

"Oh," Kelly said. Why had she expected a normal answer? When was the last time she had gotten one?

"Hold on a second; I'll change forms for you," the voice said.

The light became blinding for a moment, and then disappeared. Kelly was standing, blinking, in a room full of bookshelves, with no doors visible. The titles she could see were strange. Another woman stood where the light and sounds had been coming from. She was nerdy, gawky, dressed like an older woman, and wearing thick makeup and thick glasses, but she looked a lot younger than Kelly. Her hair was died black and very, very natty. If it had been a Halloween costume, it would have been overdone: She was _the _stereotypical mousy librarian. Her teeth were badly crooked, and it gave her a very amusing speech impediment that the disembodied voice hadn't had.

"Here'ss a question for you: Remember your early childhood?" the young woman asked.

"Not… very well, off the top of my head? Why?"

The woman reached out and touched Kelly's forehead. She hadn't noticed how close the librarian was standing.

"Remember it now?"

"Yeah. That's… weird. I didn't remem-…How did you…How?!"

"I reverse data-entropy. Particular ssskill of mine."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"Oh, don't worry about it. Walk with me: I have ss-some things I need to talk to you about."

The Librarian turned her back on Kelly, and made a strange gesture with both hands. Books and bits of shelving re-arranged themselves, and a door became visible. They exited the little room, onto a massive spiral staircase in the centre of a circular tower, and the Librarian indicated that they would be going up.

"So, are you the one I'm here to meet?"

"Your Reverberation Mas-mas (puh!) mathter, yah."

"So what exactly do you do?"

"It'd take three hourss to explain the physssics involved, but basically, everyone of your kind who travels between zzzones needs the help of a higher-order being to navigate properly. I'm yoursss!" The Librarian said, getting very perky very suddenly.

"..And why you? Is it like, my destiny to have you for a 'verberation master', or something ridiculous like that?" Kelly asked. She was getting very, _very_ tired of being condescended to.

"Not in the least. It's politicsss. You're going to be a great heroine of the nine lower zones, apparently. Or rather, there are a lot of futures where you do."

"How does _politics_ play into that?"

"No one wantss to touch you with a ten-foot pole. Higher-order beings like me don't want to rock the boat, so to speak. Most of the others don't want to intervene: the transduction-demiurge that rules your particular segment of the perception range is capricious, even occasionally volatile," the young, overdressed Ruler of Information said, and then leaned in discretely. "_We_ think he's quite common, for an emanation of the Monad, that is."

"Who are you talking about?"

"Bogleech Ssscythemantis, Lord of the Dark Domain! Surely you can hear him in your head, can't you?"

"Well, yeah… _He _is_ God_?!"

"_A_ god, if you insist, but yes, he's very powerful."

Kelly was still getting her head wrapped around this when the woman stopped her and pointed at a door.

"We're here."

The entered another small room. While there were bookshelves lining the walls, like the last, the real point of interest here was a device suspended from the ceiling. It looked like an old-fashioned telescope, pointed away from them at an odd angle, but one end seemed to be in the process of turning invisible.

"Here'ss my observatory. You can see anywhere in the perception zone with it. Come on now, you've got a lot to learn and not a whole lot of time."

The Librarian of Time and Space showed Kelly many things with the observatory, over what felt like hours. The human woman's instincts told her she'd been there much too long, but her newly awakened mind told her that the entire visit to this…place… had taken mere seconds in her personal time-frame. Between the initial rush of awakening, the near-death experience she'd just had, and the education the woman was giving her, Kelly was feeling overloaded. Finally, she got to the point.

"Look, babemousse: (did I really just say that?) This is all very well and good, but I'm just trying to find my son. That's really my only priority. Can you show me where he is?"

"No, sweetheart, there are things you have to find out for yourself. We know how the future plays out! You'll find him very easily; you don't need my help!"

"I have to be going. I _don't_ have time for—for this!"

"If you insist: I'll show you the way out, but one little thing before you go?"

"I don't suppose I have much of a choice?"

"Just a wittow kissss? It gets so lonely in the Library…" The Librarian whispered.


	4. Chapter 4

IV

"Wa-what? How long was I out?!" Kelly shouted, startling the concerned Mycelium.

"About five seconds. Calm down. Wait—Why are you spitting? Funny taste?"

"I'll tell you later. I think I can walk."

Kelly took a moment to get sure of her surroundings again. They were still on the banks of the pus river, and nothing had changed. Had that really taken no time at all? She thought about her new extra-dimensional helper. _Shudder…_

Celia was cutting a strip of material off of a nearby cell with her sword. She struggled a bit splitting the last corner off, and then offered it to Kelly as a bandage. She considered where it had come from, and had almost decided against it, but Celia made it clear she hadn't been asking. She wrapped it around the wound, and used a keratin needle that had been stuck in the lining of her hat, and thread made of Bog-knows-what to sew the ends together with a clumsy kind of stitch.

They set off down a path that Kelly had missed entirely, which lead into a deep, narrow ravine through the woods. They managed to make it to the outskirts of the worm village before Kelly fainted again. This time, however, there was no vision, and she was only unconscious for a few seconds. A large worm who'd been standing guard took the opportunity and slithered up.

"You have business within, fungus?" the guard asked in a deep, hollow voice.

"This worm is sick!"

"Who is zie?"

"Zie is a—a prisoner of mine," Celia said, thinking quick.

"Zie was walking comfortably with you when you arrived! Explain!"

Kelly came to as she heard the guard-worm raising his voice, but continued to act faint out of instinct.

"Zie thinks I'm helping zir. I'm going to deliver zir to _(cough-cough) _when zie is healed."

_"__Is that true?" Kelly thought…_

"Deliver zir to…_oh_…_ yes_… Very well: You may take zir to the Apothecary. Go straight there, do not deviate, and leave town immediately when you've dropped zir off."

"Thank you."

"You will be sent for when zie's healed. The village council would like to wish you a nice day, comrade fungus. _Their words," _the guard said, sardonically, "_not mine._"

Kelly staggered to her feet as the worm moved away.

"Come on. Last time I was in here, the Apothecary was this way…"

"Wha-what…never mind…"

Celia helped Kelly towards a slimy building made of some kind of webbing. Kelly was beginning to feel very hot, and suddenly a shooting pain went through the bite. Neither of them needed to say that she didn't have a lot of time left. Kelly felt it, and Celia could tell. It made Celia's dilemma worse: Every worm was watching her, and she had to keep up the façade of a cold-blooded wormslayer. It would mean harsh words and harsh actions. If she didn't do what she was thinking, it would look bad. If she did, well…

She decided to do it: As they arrived at the entrance to the Apothecary's, she placed an appendage on Kelly's shoulder, and tried to apologize telepathically. The human wasn't paying attention to that particular corner of her perception, and so it didn't get through. So, with as much restraint as she could, and heartbroken to have to do it, she _threw _Kelly into the building. The human screamed as she stumbled abruptly forward.

**_"_****_This worm needs medical attention. The council will pay for your services." _**Celia said, in an authoritative voice.

****With that, Celia left. Kelly lapsed into unconsciousness, not merely faint, but at the edge of death.

Time passed. Kelly aged in a straight line, the world around her in spirals. The Apothecary observed this effect, writing it down in a massive book that it always carried. The Apothecary observed many other strange things. It was an aged blue worm with a habit of sucking blood benignly from its patient's wounds like a sterile leech, but its eyes were almost human, and it had eight, on a mess of tentacle-like stalks: it saw everything, and observed everything.

Kelly would have described the experience as days. The spiral-time passing around her again and again would have been longer, maybe a month for the worms that tended to her. She was awake intermittently, and conscious of her wound disappearing quicker than it should have. When she was fully lucid, the Apothecary welcomed her formally to the place of healing. As it talked to her, not telepathically, but without a visible mouth, she noted that its voice sounded very much like a kind, but timid health professor she'd had in her junior year of college.

"...you must have many questions. Rest assured I'll get to all of them. Anything in particular you'd like an answer to now, before I get to my other patient?"

"Have you… I mean, do you know why I'm green?"

"Erm, pigment in your skin, dear? It's a fairly normal thing."

"**WHAT!?"**

"I…I… that is normal for your type of chordate, isn't it?" the kind worm said, stammering.

"No! I'm sorry, but, no! It's not normal at all. I should be kind-of pale, pinkish-yellow, y'know?"

"I'm afraid I don't. If some _condition_ has caused this, you're going to have to find a much more competent healer than myself to reverse it. Other than the last bit of fever, the wound, and a bit of a fungus infection on your back, you're in _perfect_ health. I have another patient in bad shape, ma'am. We'll talk later."

The Apothecary slithered off, but not before it had made a reasonable attempt at making a kind… _face… _at Kelly.

_"__So here I am, stuck green. How appropriate: Dad would have laughed his ass off."_


	5. Chapter 5

V

Celia was gone, and nobody knew where. In the time Kelly had been in worm village, Celia had buried herself in her normal routine of petty crime, occasional worm-slaying, and general debauchery, but it began to have a foul aftertaste. The various beings she had taken as lovers before she met Kelly were no longer so alluring, and she broke off more than one relationship.

One day, she fell off of the map entirely. None of her friends could reach her, but they heard vague rumours that she had gone home, and was trying to regain her family's honor in the Fungus Kingdom by committing some ridiculous pulp-novel heroism. They didn't believe it, of course—her friends, that is. More likely, she's met her maker, picking on the wrong kind of worm, they said…

Meanwhile, at the Apothecary's, Kelly was healing up very nicely. The fever had been gone for days in her perception. She was exercising her new powers, shifting between her time-mode and the worm-folk's mode, over and over again, to hone her skills. She had one or two further conversations with the Librarian, this time by telepathy. The Librarian insisted that Kelly take lessons in inter-zonal travel—from her sweet little reverberation master, of course.

She learned how to hop zones with some effort, and to communicate with all sorts of para-zonal entities, and, especially important for a recently awakened grey-zoner, how to avoid casting herself into the abyss with a misrecognition of a spiraling-segment. The librarian sometimes appeared as she had in the Library, and sometimes as a sort of insect with six sets of compound eyes and twelve dangling mouthparts, surrounded by a blinding aura. Kelly found her company unpleasant in either form. The uncouth young woman seemed to be trying fairly hard to make Kelly uncomfortable, unless she actually meant well by saying things like "And remember not to worry; I'm watching you _all_ the time," as she faded back into her own zone, winking.

One day, when the Librarian was about to call on her, Kelly went on a walk out in the village, to see if she could get away for once. She found the village was far larger than the parts she had seen, more of a small town, and it reminded her of some old-world city, with cobblestones lining the narrow streets (made of lord-knows-what), quaint old inns and shoppes, and a French-looking café. Overhead, an overhang of some rock-like formation cast the town into perpetual twilight by day, and meant that every night was black, without even the glow of the dormant photophores. She approached the café, debating whether the coffee would be safe, and had just decided to risk it when all hell broke loose.

Someone (some-worm?), had recognized her greenish pallor, and screamed the words "**_Gurnissen's Flesh Blight!_**" at the top of what must have been some impressive… lungs?

Before Kelly could react, a fast, skinny worm wearing a beaked mask had a butterfly net on a long pole over her entire body. Another worm approached with a primitive syringe on a four-foot shaft.

A shooting pain… Sleep…

She awoke in her usual bed at the Apothecary's, with what went for an IV in her arm. The glass bottle hanging from the headboard of the bed was full of something clear and fizzing, and it bubbled quite noisily as it dripped. An inch-long worm with numbing saliva was attached next to the needle. She called out for the Apothecary.

Time passed, and she worked up the courage to pull the needle out and take a look around. The small worm scurried away when she stood up. As she approached the door, she could hear a hushed but intense argument coming from the front room.

"It doesn't escape again. Clear?"

"This worm says yes, councilwoman" the meek voice of the healer said, in an extremely formal way.

"Final Mercy if necessary. Again I ask, am I making myself clear?"

"This worm says yes. This worm has not the poisons needed for Mercy, but they will be procured shortly."

"Alright… Knock off the formality, now, my love."

The Apothecary sighed its relief,

"Do what you have to do. _Te amo._"

"_Te amo._"

Kelly was halfway back in bed when the Apothecary came in. She yelped.

"Oh lord! I'm sorry, I didn't mean to…"

The Apothecary cut her off with a comforting, meaningless sound.

"Everything is fine. I've just been ordered to euthanize you if your condition gets worse, but she knows I wouldn't really do it."

"Why didn't you tell me what I had?"

The Apothecary sighed. After hesitating, it came closer to her, and said "Well, Kelly, listen: it's not terrific. You are aware of the realm known as the abyss?"

"…yes..."

"The disease you have originates there. I believe you have a fairly benign form, but two of my other patients have the malignant form. I believe you are not at risk of dying yourself, but, short of taking you to The Hospital, I don't believe I can…" it stopped, because Kelly had just grimaced.

After a minute, Kelly blurted out "That was your _wife?!_"

"Yes. Problem?"

Kelly made it quite clear that she intended to escape the village. The Apothecary was kind, and insisted that she learn some things about the trade while she was waiting for the opportunity. The great old worm brought her old-fashioned yellow glass safety goggles and a ceramic bowl, both very rare materials, and with a myriad of bottles and vials full of strange chemicals and essential oils, it taught her some primitive potion-making. From Kelly's incomplete, but diverse medical knowledge, primarily gained from being the mother of a sick child, she knew that some of the cures she was taught to brew were quite effective, practical field medicine, and some… _weren't…_

_ "…__no, no, no… two parts Phlegm of Blackworm to three parts Deathwood sap…"_

She was still worried, and very angry. Throughout her stay, she was increasingly concerned that Celia had truly betrayed her, and she vowed to find out and…and…_ At any rate, _she never could bring herself to think about what she would do if it was true.

Perhaps, she admitted, late one night, she would be a little heart-broken.

One morning, she got up before the photophores were fully awake, and snuck into one of the other patients' rooms. She struck a match, trying not to think too hard about where it came from. In the low light, she strained her eyes. She could just barely make out, lying in the low bed, a young green worm with a massive stitched-up wound to what was probably its front end. What looked like some kind of black pustule was forming near the gash. Kelly shuddered: she'd seen it before. _So her son had had the malignant form of what the worms called "Gurnissen's"…_

Kelly extinguished the match and snuck back to the common room, returned with a pair of cell-leather gloves that had been drenching in sterile solution, and gently shook the worm.

"Hey, hey… Wake up," Kelly whispered.

The worm gurgled from one of the mouths near its middle, then slowly began to stir.

"Ughhh. Ffffffvat… vat? what? _Papa Nurgle!_ What time is it?"

"Your perception? Quarter before dawn."

"Who—you're de-d-d-the other p-patient, yyeah?"

"Yeah. "

"Whadda hell you want?"

"How did you get the blight?"

"Ugh, at the pleasure-house… Y'know, I'd rather not talk about it…"

"You mean it's going—_listen to me, this is very important!_—you mean this plague is going around here?" Kelly asked, raising her voice more than she intended. There was no answer; the worm had drifted off again.

Suddenly, trumpets were sounding outside! The worm started awake, and shouted "what the hell are you…" before realizing that the green tetrapod that had been bothering him had had nothing to do with it.

Kelly ran outside. There was army of fungus approaching!

**_To be continued…_**


End file.
